Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports.
Turkey's energy bill due to imports will fall with the increase in use of renewable energy sources. We have no control over the prices of petroleum and natural gas.
Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.
I thrive with fashion and shopping and imports and things like that. It gives me a rush. I love Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus and all the top-of-the-line houses.
As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans to designated filmmakers, and have placed quotas not only on imports but on television time.
America stopped making vinyl and phased out the single but Germany held out and refused. Warner's never phased out vinyl in Germany. Now America imports it!
Simply raising fuel economy standards for passenger cars and light trucks to 33 miles per gallon would eliminate our oil imports from the Persian Gulf.
I've always considered making it legal for Americans to import their prescription drugs a free-trade issue. Imports create competition and keep domestic industry more responsive to consumers.
Our foreign-exchange reserves when I took over were no more than a billion dollars; that is, roughly equal to two weeks' imports.